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Jul 19 Moe Berg

Born on March 2nd, 1902, Morris "Moe" Berg was called the "strangest man to ever play baseball" and "the brainiest guy in baseball".

Moe Berg attended Princeton University and graduated magna cum laude (with high honor) in modern languages. He began baseball at Princeton, where he played first baseman his freshman year before switching positions to shortstop. During games, he would communicate with his second baseman in Latin.

After his collegiate career, he was mainly sought after by two teams: New York Giants (now San Francisco Giants), and the Brooklyn Robins (now the Los Angeles Dodgers). Both of those teams wanted Jewish blood on their team, in order to appeal to the large Jewish community in New York, however the Giants had two future Hall-Of-Famers on their team, so he signed with the Robins.

His first season went pretty poorly, where he batted a mere .187, and made 21 errors in 47 games. He was sent around the minor leagues, where a scout once famously said "Good field, no hit." That same season, while studying in Paris, he began his habit of reading multiple newspapers daily. He considered newspapers "alive", and if anyone were to read it before him, he consider it "dead" and would throw it away.

The next season, he began playing catcher, which he was much better at. He finished his career a fairly average baseball player. When a teammate was told Moe Berg spoke seven languages fluently, he responded "I know, and he can't hit in any of them".

After Pearl Harbor was bombed on December 7th, 1941, the United States went to war in World War II. In order to help, Berg began working for the Office of Strategic Services (preceded the CIA) and he worked as a paramilitary operations officer. In September 1943, he parachuted into occupied Yugoslavia to determine which forces were the strongest.

Later, Berg was assigned to Project Larson, which was supposed to kidnap Italian rocket and missile specialists and bring them to the U.S. to slow the Axis' progress of building a rocket. Berg was part of a project within Larson, called Project AZUSA, and he was supposed to investigate whether Werner Heisenberg, Nobel-prize winning physicist was helping the Nazi's create an atomic bomb. If Berg suspected Heisenberg to be leading the nuclear program, he had the authority to kill Werner Heisenberg.

Berg went to one of Heisenberg's lectures, and after meeting with him afterwords, he was debating assassinating him. He walked with him in a dark alley, and Heisenberg seemed pessimistic about the Axis' chances in the war, so it was evident that they didn't have a nuclear program. He ended up not killing him, and it turned out that there was no legitimate nuclear program.

The rest of his life, Moe Berg lived a quiet life: he was occasionally seen at baseball games, and he spoke on radio shows once in a while. On May 29, 1972, Moe Berg died at the age of 70. His final words were said to have been "How did the Mets do today?". He lived an amazing life and he was a very interesting person who led an impressive life.